著者

河野真理江

出版者

日本映像学会

雑誌

映像学 (ISSN:02860279)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.90, pp.57-75,97, 2013-05-25 (Released:2023-03-31)

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Ryoju (1961, Gosho Heinosuke) is a film that can be categorized as bungei-melodrama, which was a subgenre of Japanese film melodrama for female audience. However, the film has, nevertheless, a great similarity to Hollywood family melodrama that is a subsequent generic category in terms of style, technology, themes and women’s film. Interestingly, in Japanese film discourse during the 1950s, some films such as Written on the wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956) were considered works resembling to bungei-melodrama. This fact challenges current discussions that have assumed that these films were rarely understood as “melodrama” or “women’s film” in those days. The main purpose of this paper is to define Ryoju as a paradigmatic work of bungei-melodrama, engaging the Japanese genre with major discussions of melodrama in film studies. It also considers some critical differences between two “melodrama” genres. First of all, the paper will analyze Ryoju by focusing on three critical issues: the representation of the upper middle class, the organization of sexual power struggle, and ideological contradiction in film criticism. Second, it will demonstrate how the three issues allow us to see both similarity and difference between Japanese bungei-melodrama and Hollywood melodrama. Finally, the paper will explore the way to associate two genres, discussing genre re-genrification, one of critical interests in melodrama.